Computer help

Mr._OCaz

Last night my youung daughter switched off my computer and now it just constantly boots in a loop and doesn't even reach the windows start up screen. My desktop pc is about 6 years old and think it is past its best to be honest.

Now I tried entering the set up menu to see if I could try start in safe mode but there is no option to do so and I tried to boot it from installation disk for XP but it is not recognsing that there is a disk in CD rom drive as i think that might be broken too :mad:

So just wondering what my options are?

Now I was thinking of replacing the computer anyway so not bothered if it is knackered but my biggest concern is 5 years worth of pics on the hard drive which are not completely backed up - I know stupid me!! - and I have have probably 5-10% of the printed or put on disks.

Now is there a way I can extract these files from the hard drive? If so can I do it by somehow connecting the hard drive to my laptop and how would I got about doing that??

Thanks in advance!

pcombo

i would say the last resort would be put a new hard drive into the comp and keep the old one in install windows on to the new hard drive that way you will be able to access.

try repairing the current os.

patman99

You can remove the Hard drive, and conect it up to a working PC, then just burn them on to DVD.

kwikbreaks

Your drive will be PATA and modern machines use SATA. You may strike lucky and find your new machine can support both but don't bank on it. You may need to borrow or buy a USB drive caddy that supports your old PATA disk. If you have an extenal drive already it may be PATA so you could use that.

Richard_Wells

I appreciate you're considering getting a new computer but I'd see whether you can salvage your existing one anyway.

You say it goes in a constant loop. Does it throw up any errors when it does this?

The fact that it's not booting from the CD may possibly be because of a setting in your BIOS. When the pc is booting it often says something like "hit x to enter setup" or "hit x to enter bios" or something similar. If not, try hitting F1 or F2 or DEL or ESC or F10 when it's booting. One of those may do the trick.

Once in the BIOS/SETUP look for an option in the menus which says "boot priority". It will, likely, be set to boot from A then C. Change it to boot from your CD drive FIRST. Possibly this will be D.
Once you've done that, quit the BIOS "saving your changes" and you should be able to boot from the XP disk and repair windows.

Does any of the above make sense?

Mr._OCaz

Hi Richard,

Tried that setting priority to boot from disk but CD is still not working saying please insert disk :mad:

Richard_Wells

Mr._OCaz wrote: »

Hi Richard,

Tried that setting priority to boot from disk but CD is still not working saying please insert disk :mad:

And you get this message even tho the XP disk is in the CD Drive? Can you hear the CD drive whirring? Ie. Does it have power? If the CD drive has a light on the front does the light come on at all?

Assuming there's nothing wrong with the XP disk itself (and you inserted it into the drive the right way up!!) then I can only think the motherboard is shot. But then again it could be a PSU fault not delivery quite enough power.

Hmm, I'm afraid I'm not sure to be honest with you Mr Ocaz. To that end, unless you can find someone who can physically take a look at it and tinker with it a bit I fear removing the hard drive and putting it into a another computer or drive caddy is your only way out.

The hard drive should have a label on the top with a make and model number on it. If you could let us know what it says we can point you in the right direction for getting a caddy etc.

Or perhaps do nothing until a guru stops by here and tells you exactly what the problem is